The Bible: A Brief Introduciton

The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. Proverbs 9:10

 

This project is of enormous in scope. The span ranges from the earliest writings of the Mesopotamian Empire to the present day. The idea which gave birth to this project is that the artificial  overlay of the enlightenment onto humanity shifting the epistemological framework from meaning to matter is collapsing and that this collapse will lead to an evolution backwards rather than a synthetic revolution forward owing to internal contradictions. This backwards evolution comes as the epistemological epoch of the Enlightenment is eclipsed and we evolve back to the cognitive framework described in the biblical library.

In order to achieve this I begin with the ancient near eastern ideas which, after massive period of time, would be coalesced and perfected in the biblical corpus. With that in place, and before we go into the history and consequences of the Enlightenment and the resultant rootless questioning mind of the west, here we are at the heart of the project.

In order to understand what it means to evolve backwards towards a biblical epistemology we first have to make sense of the Bible — a job which has historically been incredibly difficult and which, for various reasons we will discuss in the following months, finds roadblocks.

The thing we have to do first is avoid the pitfall which leads into casual atheism. In general, I believe it to be the case that the word atheist can be defined as someone unable or unwilling to take the question of being seriously. To begin understanding the biblical texts requires that we think on a less superficial level. The Old Testament is the heart of the people of Israel. Israel, in Hebrew, means “one who wrestles with God.”

Before we begin talking about the Bible, we should take seriously that it is a series of books written by and about people not

defined by their absolute faith, but by their struggles with God. What does it mean to struggle with God? These are not stories which are intended for blind adherence. These are the stories of being itself. The most complicated, most nuanced and most thorough philosophical analysis of man and God that exists. These are stories which cannot be merely read or told, but must be contended with. This is what I think it means to say that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God.

We need to approach these stories with serious and sober thought. With this in mind, I implore you to begin this journey with me leaving aside your positive or negative connotations of religion. There is something going on here which must be courageously confronted. If we decide to seek the treasure, we must first confront the dragon. We are not talking about how to fix a flat. We are here to wrestle with God.

If we are truly to discuss the mind of God, the place of man and what being itself is, we should be ready for a battle that will leave us permanently scarred. When the Hebrew forefather Jacob encountered and wrestled with God he was left with his hip permanently injured and his named changed from Jacob to Israel. We aren’t called on simply to believe. This is more than that. This is a transformative experience whose undertaking might well be the most important thing a man can do.

With this in mind, I would like to begin by saying a few things about what the Bible isn’t.

First and foremost, the Bible is not a book. The Bible, from the Greek τὰ βιβλία (ta biblia) ,means “the books.” The plural is important because the Bible isn’t a book, but a collection of books — a library.

The second thing that the Bible is not is a guide for how to have a happy life. Whatever is going on in these ancient stories, they have nothing to do with you being happy. And why should they? Is your goal to be happy? Just sit around giggling like an idiot? Isn’t there something more? Isn’t there something noble to us? Marx would have us believe that religion is the opiate of the masses. Like most of what Marx says, this is painfully wrong. The very notion that somehow we are being promised some form of happiness is contradicted on every page of every book of the Bible.

Furthermore, the stories in the Bible are not intended to make a person passive by any means despite what shallow modern critics, the inheritors of Marx’s resentment filled nonsense or casual atheists seem to believe. That the Bible is some kind of infantile wish fulfillment is something only possible to believe for someone who either is unwilling or unable to extract out the wealth of meaning continued in these books. The neomarxist and casual atheist critiques of the Bible are akin to a rat’s critique of quantum mechanics. The biblical library calls us to the cross, not to a safe room filled with hedonistic abundance where the machinations of a powered elite maintaining a status quo become an acceptable evil.

Freud thought the stories of the Bible were a way of positing an eternal father figure that transcends the universe in order to escape the fear of death or the uncertainty of living a life without answers. Freud too shows an incredible lack of understanding of the material — something that would be a major source of contention between him and Carl Jung eventually leading to their falling out. Like the postmodernists who are inordinately fond of him, Freud had a good set of questions but his answers left much to be desired.

We will spend time at lengths on both Marx and Freud’s misunderstandings, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky’s accurate predictions of where they would lead and how these ideas penetrated modern academia leaving casual thinkers with very little in the way of sophisticated thought. But for now it is sufficient to say that Moses staring into a promised land he will never enter, a flood which destroys humanity or the crucified Christ do not scream infantile security, death avoidance and opiate of the masses. Any argument to the contrary can be summarily dismissed.

So if this is what the Bible isn’t, what is it?

The first thing that we can say about the biblical library is that it is a series of books cobbled together over the course of a thousand years written by multiple authors and edited by multiple editors in a way that the series of stories taken as a whole has a unified plot. Take a step outside of your cynical modern mind to just for one moment marvel at just that. If the Bible were nothing other than that it would still be uncanny in its existence.

The best work on who wrote the Bible was done, I think, by Richard Elliott Friedman. His book Who Wrote the Bible (1987) is considered, and in my opinion rightfully so, to be the seminal work on the topic. In his book he separates out four separate sources of the biblical writings which represent authors or groups of authors. The sources are:

J (Yahwist): Written around 950-850 BC in the southern kingdom of Judah, characterized by its use of the name “Yahweh” for God and a vivid, anthropomorphic storytelling style focused on human-centered narratives.

E (Elohist): Written around 850-750 BC in the northern kingdom of Israel, using “Elohim” for God (Elohim is the Hebrew plural for God. This leads many people to think that it is a holdout from polytheistic cultures. However, leading Hebrew Scholars say this isn’t the case. Biblical Hebrew expert Dennis Praeger explains this by saying it is a plural the way fish is a plural, indistinguishable from the singular) with a less anthropomorphic view and emphasis on northern traditions, prophets and abstract themes.

P (Priestly): Written around 600-400 BC, likely by priestly circles after the Babylonian exile, focusing on ritual laws, genealogies and temple practices. Also using “Elohim” for God.

D (Deuteronomist): Written around 600 BC, centered on the book of Deuteronomy, emphasizing Moses, centralized worship in Jerusalem and obedience to God’s laws.

Friedman also argues that multiple editors he calls collectively “The Redactor” edited the books of the Old Testament between 750-400 BC.

While there are some that argue that Friedman’s analysis is a challenge against traditional views of divine authorship, for my part I think that if anything it enhances it. This will be a topic in future essays especially with regard with Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious and how that pertains to both Kant’s idea of epigenetic spontaneity and the Heraclitean (and later Christian) idea of the logos.

For my part, I believe Friedman to have done excellent work. I will not detail out all of his arguments for these categories, but I do suggest reading his book.

I will end this quick introduction to the heart of my project by saying this: it is with great trepidation that I take on this task. There are places where, undoubtedly, I will be wrong. However educated you are you are simply not educated enough to process the completeness of the biblical library. As I mentioned above, this is not something that can be reduced to a bullet point list. This is work that requires active engagement — wrestling — and engaging, even in the best case scenario, is a true struggle.

I find it of passing interest that people of faith all struggle with that faith while casual critics and atheists never doubt their position. It is, to my thinking, just another sign of the unwillingness of the casual thinker to engage with difficult, meaningful and transformative ideas and their inability to see past superficial ideas.

I take heart in the idea that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom as this project — and especially this part of the project — fills me with terror. So, let us venture into these ancient stories and take a look under the hood of existence itself.